3: We just set a huge goal for 2032

Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, a Laravel developer.

And I'm Gavin Ty, sales and marketing person.

We're building no. Let's do that again. That's no good. Do you want this to say something different? No. No? You happy with that? Alright. Let's scrap the let's scrap the person. I don't think that. All right. Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, Laravel developer.

Daventai. Oh. I thought you were gonna say Laravel developer. Oh, no. But you need this to you're the founder of, you're the founder of Six Sides, cofounder. You're not a Laravel developer. In this context, you're a

No. But but if we both just say we're cofounders, that doesn't tell anybody anything. Okay. So I think this we can work on it. We'll stick with this one for today.

Sure.

So don't cut me off this time.

Alright.

Alright. Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, a Laravel developer.

And I'm Gavin Ty, sales and marketing extraordinaire. Don't cut me off, man.

Oh, fuck me. Okay. The script is

not working. Okay.

I will give you time after you do your sales and marketing. Okay.

Alright. Final thing.

Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, a Laravel developer.

I'm Gavin Ty, background in sales and marketing for b to b SaaS companies.

We're building SixSides.co, and then that's an events platform that helps you build a stronger community through events. And this is our b to b SaaS journey. Gavin, how are going?

Good, mate. How are you?

Yeah. I'm good. I'm here. I'm ready to record. We're into week three now. Doing well. And it's fun. I'm having a blast with it. Right?

Yeah. I I like how you mix it up with a hat this week.

I'm trying to yeah. It's having a big bald head on on camera for half an hour. It's it doesn't look so good. So I'm trying to mix it up, different hats. I've got like I think I've got a hats drawer. I think I've got like eight different hats

Yeah. Right.

In the drawer. So you'll you'll get to see them all. And then by the time we get through those, it'll be into winter. Maybe we'll get some beanies or something going. So

Yeah. Yeah. Nice.

What about you? Are you a hat guy or no hats?

No. My hat when I wear a hat, it just goes all funny from there on. Right? So I do like it if I get into the habit, but I also, I try not to as well. I don't like hat hair. So

I don't have that problem. So

No. No. And and your bald head mucks up with the contrast and the editing. Right? Like, it

That's true. Yeah. When we were doing the, the cover art. Yeah. You look great. You've got an outline. And I just like I looked like I'd been beheaded from only half me hit. So Yeah. We play to our strengths. Alright.

Yeah. Everyone who's listening. Yeah. So last week, if you're only just listening, I'm in Queensland on the Gold Coast, we had cyclone Alfred, which is the first cyclone since, I think, 1952 come down this far on the coast. And it stuck off the coast for ages.

So Yeah.

Yeah. Thanks for asking.

No. That's okay. Look. We put it in the title of the last show, so I'm guessing some people would be interested in in what happened. It was kind of like it kept circling. Right?

It was

kind of just like, come on. Let's just get this thing done. So, yeah, that was interesting for me to watch, you know, from down Sydney Way. For us, it was it was quite windy, and it did rain a little bit, but, yeah, it was nothing like what you were going through. But, yeah, just the whole time, I was like, what's going on? Let's you know, is this thing gonna hit? We weren't sure what was happening. So

Yeah. Well, we it made me have a look and investigate, like, what are the categories of cyclones because you're not in them. You don't really pay attention. So we had a hundred kilometer an hour winds, and I had a look at what a category three, four, and five it was category two here. Category five is something like 250 plus kilometer out winds, and I'm like, oh my Jeez.

Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. That'd, like, knock your house over. Two fifty.

Oh, mate. Yeah. Absolutely. So, mate, how was your week? How's your week last week?

Well, it's been good. We've got a lot of stuff done with six sides, and we'll kind of get into that soon. But all in all, fairly good. Got to catch up with some friends last weekend, some people that I hadn't seen in, like, a year and a half because they they had been overseas. So that was awesome.

Put them in the HubSpot, mate. Put them in the HubSpot so we don't don't lose track of what's going on.

Yeah. That's right. Yep. Absolutely. So, yeah, it was cool.

Yeah. Right.

I'm loving that this is just so much faster, and it feels like we're in the flow with it now. So and little numbers update for you, and then I'll ask you about your week. I think we've got about 10 subscribers now for the podcast. So Yeah. Right. Things are going well. It's Okay.

Yeah. Nice.

You know, small small steps. It's early days, but, you know, ten isn't nothing. So if you are listening, thank you. And, if you have any comments or things that you want us to talk about on the show, just reach out. We'll have all the links in the in the show notes. So that was me, mate. What about you?

Mate, question well, question for you. How do you balance your development commitments with Atlas, your your your your your big day business, and then our our our stuff with event kit, sorry. With six sides, event kit was the previous name. How do you balance that between the both?

It's tricky. It's, you know, it's like balancing anything else, any other, you're getting pulled in lots of different directions all the time, not just with work, but with family or whatever. It is helpful to have like deadlines on certain things to know that, okay, cool, I can kind of hold on this for a couple of weeks, but then I'm really gonna have to set aside some time to get in and focus on this thing for two weeks and build out this feature or whatever, like some of the things that we're talking about building in to have available maybe around middle of this year for some leads that we've got at the moment. So thinking through all of that stuff and trying to get like a timeline so that I can balance everything. Like, it's just hard.

think there's a balancing act too, right? Like if you have all the time in the world, you can be pedantic and as detail orientated as you need to be. I think when you're balancing the constraints of time and commitments elsewhere, I think there has to be a trade off to go, is 80% good enough, 70% good enough? And then I can come back to it later. Because I think at the end of the day, the final 10 or 20% is really for us, right? It's really not for

Yeah.

And you're hyper detail orientated in certain things. I'm quite relaxed in other things. So yeah, it's interesting to see you work in that, because I do see you put yourself under stress where you go, man, don't worry about it. It's fine. Yeah. Because you are you're paid by the keystroke, right? I'm paid by the outcome. It's slightly different different.

Yeah. Anyway. It's true. Yeah. It's true. We'll get into specifically a a great example of that, in just a little bit. But, but tell me about your your week. How have you been?

Yeah. So your my week is for Six Sides is really about establishing, connections in industry, and just letting them know we're there. And I'm really trying to leverage my relationships or my past work of I do a fair bit of mentoring work. So it's always about and I never knew, because I always wanted to give back for the community, but I have built a set of relationships out of there. So this week I've just been having there's an opportunity or a potential confer or there is a conference, around here coming up towards the end of the year and or middle of the year, sorry.

Right? Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. Is that how does that number sit with you? Two or three events that we will be we're potentially able to get to this year. Would you like, when we first got started with this, would you have expected more or less in the first year? Because we know you're gonna lay the groundwork. Right? And like we talked about last week, these events, it's like twelve months in advance often. So we kind of knew that going in. But yeah, how are you feeling about that number?

Oh, so when I say two or three events this year, that's all we currently know of. So Right. More will come onto our radar. As as soon as you start doing this stuff, things as you can tell, like, what's been happening, I'm a big proponent of if you start putting effort out and the energy out, things will come in from left field that you're not aware of. But if you don't put any effort out, things won't come back in.

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm excited. Maybe some of that we could do on here on mic, but some of that we'll we'll keep to ourselves. But

Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. Well, I guess some more follow-up. No, actually, let's continue on with the slide deck that we put together. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah, so we have to let people know that we have to give them a takeaway as such, right? And I think this is an evolution. This isn't the first document, which I think most people probably try to make the mistake of, Hey, I'm going to make a pretty doc, right? Their evolution for us was is, well, why are we going to build a business? Like, what does a community look like?

Yeah. Absolutely. And then we how we kind of came up with the content was this, like, multi thousand word doc that Gavin was talking about, largely focused on the features that we have available, different things that we're thinking of. And we then took that, condensed it down, just pulled out the really valuable parts. And that's what ultimately made it into this new presentation doc that we've got. What would you call this doc?

It's an overview. I should just give it an overview. Yeah. I changed it from we did have it as a pitch deck. It's not a pitch deck. It's a six sides overview document. Yeah.

Okay. So so this overview doc, how we then went about getting something that was nicely designed was we used Upwork, right, which you have used in the past and you've talked a bit with me about before on some other projects. So, yeah, what was that process like to go through and find someone on Upwork? Did you already have someone in mind or you just started from scratch? How did you go about that?

So I think it takes, I've used Upwork quite a bit over a period of time and I've had varying degrees of success. So it's all about practice really. I kind of, I put a job post up and then I'll just let people apply to me. Right. And it's, I'm really looking for their past work.

Well, from my perspective, yes, the design immediately, I was like, okay, this looks fantastic. What was hard for me was then doing the editing on it because like you and I have talked about, I'm quite detail oriented. And in my mind, like, the details really matter. Like, I want this thing to sell us. Right?

Oh.

And it was tricky. This took, like, three hours to do, and it was way more time than I had allocated. I did this yesterday, and I did not have three hours to put into this thing. But you were just like, mate, we need to get this thing out the door. Let's get it sent off.

So here's the thing. I could tell that you added in the images from snap from screenshots of the app.

Yeah.

Couldn't tell anything else you did.

Yeah. Well Right? But only I think only because you're not super detail oriented. If it was sent to someone like me, they'd be like, oh, yeah. Okay. They really, like, thought this through and, like, the the margins and stuff, everything looks good. Like, anyway.

Margins? Come on.

Yep. Come on. I'm serious. We wanna look good like this. Yeah. That's what it takes.

I get it. So I'm of a let me you you put your screen, your filter over what how you look at a doc, right? How it's gonna sell us and stuff like that. I'm I think about it is what does the emotion of the doc portray? Because people aren't gonna buy us to people aren't gonna say, great doc. We'll buy. That's just never gonna happen. Right? It's just never gonna happen.

You're breaking my heart here.

Yeah. But the emotion of it is like, this is sharp. This looks pretty good. This is not polarizing. Oh, that's not oh, look at the spellings often or the cap. Like, just along with that cap, all that stuff is okay, and the emotion of it backs the it it's consistent with how we're trying to portray ourselves. To me, that's enough. Right? Because it's to continue the conversation. Right?

Well, yeah. Yeah. I wanted to. Right? I I messaged you in our Slack, and I was like, hey. Can I just finish this off tomorrow? I was out of time. So already as it was, I had to, like, push some other things out of the way that I was meant to get to. Yep. And you were just like, no.

It's learning. Because I think the learning of that is to say how detailed like, hey. You're gonna work on it and go, well, how detailed do we want it? Right? Well Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. So on the point of taking the work that this Upwork designer had done, correct me if I'm wrong, did they do it in PowerPoint? That's how they yeah.

Yeah. He he said he designed a PowerPoint, but then he gave it to us in Canva so we can turn it into a like, we can use it more without skill set or Yeah. Or different versions of it. Yeah.

Yeah. So then, why I bring it up was because what gave me a lot of trouble was the formatting differences between, PowerPoint and then into Canva. It meant that, like, for there's a bunch of, like, little blocks, like, colored blocks or whatever inside of this PowerPoint. And I couldn't edit them without, like, totally recreating them because it was just like I think it Canva kind of thought those were, like, images. And so it was giving me these, like, apply a filter, and I'm like, no.

I'm just gonna while we're talking, I'll check and see if we got any replies back about it. I don't think we would've. But that's a good point. Right? So make sure next time if someone does it, if because I asked them to design in Canva goes, do it in PowerPoint, then I'll just I should have gone, no. No. No. Let's do it in Canva predominantly, like, primarily so we don't have that issue.

Yeah.

Yep. Okay. Cool.

We'll

see. No replies back so far, mate. So I'll let you know the first time we get as soon as we get

one. Yep. Sounds good.

Alright. So another update from last week. We talked about redundancy. Right? We talked about how I've got my screen smashed, which is still sitting in front of me, and it still makes me angry every time I see it, but it is what it is.

Nice.

I can have that. And, the challenge is as well is because the Mac Mini doesn't have webcam, I've gotta buy web a webcam and all that kind of stuff. So that's allowed me to up go up in quality of webcam. So when we start recording this, I'm doing more recordings, and I have I can go up in ability to do that too. So there is a there's a bit of a win out of that.

In a lot

more space. Far, yeah, far better position.

That's great. Yeah. Well, good good call. I'm glad it was helpful, with the Mac Mini. With your like, there's this thing of and and I'm gonna get it wrong.

Yep.

And then it should be on like something like it should be on two or three different types of media. So like hard drives, and then some companies, a lot of big companies will have data on like tape, magnetic tape and stuff.

Yep.

Again, I'm sorry if I'm I'm not

I've heard that before, and it's a level of time. Right? So you can go back one day before, a week before, six months before. Yeah. Whatever it is. Yeah.

All that sort of stuff. Yeah. So you probably don't need to do that level

think I'm gonna get a magnetic tape drive anytime soon.

Okay. But I do

have a hard drive. Yeah. I have a hard drive here. So, yeah, I will do that as well. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's do it. I'm keen. I I asked you the other day or I forget when it was. Like, hey. Do you want me to look into this at all? Do you want me to do anything? And you're like, nope. I've got it. So, yeah, I this is all gonna be new to me, and I can try and be the voice of the audience. So, yeah, let's do it.

So one of the things that I when I've been selling, working at B2B SaaS companies, before, one thing that I've always, that has never quite struck me or haven't quite understood is the development team seems to just create a list of features and then just goes and build the features. And then we've got to go to the market and say, hey, we built this feature. And you go, well, where did that come from? Who said that that was useful in the market? And I think well, know my observation of that was is not all features or not all all functionality that was developed hit the mark.

Strategic advisory council. Sounds very posh.

We sound like we're got our shit together, to be honest. We know

what we're doing. We got an overview doc. It's not sloppy. And we've got a strategic advisory council. It's this is Yeah.

Mhmm.

But for sure, if we can hear directly from more event organizers or other people as well, other sides of the ecosystem, The other types of people that we're going after, like attendees or from speakers or sponsors. If we can get more voices, absolutely, surely we will build a better product.

Yep. So I think you hit on the nail here inadvertently is hope. You said hope, right? Have a product manager. I think we wouldn't be going into this business not thinking that this is going to scale and we're going to have at some stage twenty, thirty people, right?

Right? Yeah.

Yeah. And and and it's word-of-mouth is by far the best lead generation tool. We've already it's already been proved here now. So yeah.

Yeah. And we don't have a budget to put towards advertising yet. And, yeah. So this is this is our play for now. Absolutely.

I I I don't think we should put money in advertising until we figure out the product market fit or the the fit and how to actually turn $1 into three. Right? If we can figure out how to turn $1 into three or five or 10, then that's when we go, well, let's just dump marketing dollars in the front end.

Right? Yeah. We're a long way from that for sure.

Yeah. 100%. At least three weeks.

Yeah. Episode what would that be? Episode seven then. We'll Yep. We're spending all the money on advertising.

Of the podcast. You got the money. Alright.

So how do you get started with What's the what's the first step?

Well, I really think here is I'm gonna start talking to some people. Like, I'm already having conversations with these key people. There is a I have a a north star that I wanna I wanna get our business into. Right? Should I call it out on here? Do you reckon I should?

Well, is it gonna is it a competitive advantage that you're gonna give away?

Well, I'm I'm I'm, calling it out in public, so we'll see. Like, it's week three. What's the date today? The the March 19 or something like that. I have a vision, and I have a I don't know how to make this happen. I'm about to call it out, Mitch. Calm calm down. Keep your head on. In 2032, the Brisbane Olympics are coming here to Australia. Right?

Yeah. We'll get a lot of value out of, what the council will will provide us, the insights.

Yep. That's right. So we need to like, I've got some stuff here. I've I've referred to my best, workmate, Chatchipiti, on how to, what to do. And the first one is to find a strategic value for participants. Right? Yep. The first mover advantage, maybe we give them early access to certain things. Maybe we give them discounts. For me up here in Queensland, I give a lot of time away mentoring.

Well, yeah, that's a good question. Defining the value for what the participant is going to get.

We have to be. Yeah.

Yeah. We you know, they're not just gonna do it for nothing, but you have already contributed a lot of value. And, like, I I've seen this with how you work. It's, like, front and center of almost every interaction you have with someone up front is how can I be helping you? You know?

We'll have a sword, you know, or

we'll That's right.

We need to get

a merchant still going. Yeah. Sell swords on the merch store. Yes. The fact that you've already helped a lot of these people ought to help them. But Yeah. Totally, If we're getting, you know, meaningful insights from this group, then, yeah, if there's you know, we can help them out with discounts, like you said, or anything else that we can think of. Yeah. I think it's great. I think there's alignment there already.

Yep. And what about the strategic value for you?

What do you mean?

So, what what value is it to you having this, advocacy group advisory sorry, advisory council. Yeah. What what's the strategic value for yourself? You're killing me. I'm mate.

I'm a council bit. Yeah. Well, we don't build the wrong things. We don't build things that people don't want. You know? I want to build what our customers or potential customers want. Yep. That's how you build a strong business. Right? So that's the main thing that I wanna get out of this is like, well, what are people asking for?

No. I think it's, an observation, again, from other businesses that I've worked in. When you get client facing people like myself, right, and you're like, oh, I don't have to do it. Right? And that's where you're like, I can just develop that.

Yeah. I completely agree. Like, that's how you fall off is you stop listening to what your customers want and they go find someone else. Right? So Yeah. That's

right. If you're if you're not courting, someone else is courting. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So it says identify and recruit the right participants. I already think I have some people in mind. I think we're just maybe three two or three at the moment. But in here, says large event organizers. I have one of those already that I met at a networking event.

We'll get that in the show notes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Or we might we'll figure that out. On the website. Maybe we'll yeah.

Yeah. Awesome. Oh, I can't wait. Yep.

Cool. So, what else you got on next week, mate? What are you doing?

Well, before that, a question, how long would you expect to keep this group going? Is it through the lifetime of the business? And I'm sure, like, people will come in and out. Right? We won't have people for the next ten years.

Yeah. Look. I think, yeah, I see it being an indefinite thing. I would see people would cycle in and out as we would go because people will only, in my mind, hey, I'm happy to give you three months of my time over every couple of months, right, like a couple of hours of their time. And then keep as you develop and you maybe develop more functionality and you start going up, or maybe we've looked at, hey, we're going to surface this part of the market now with that current functionality, then we go down.

Yeah.

Yeah. What do you think?

Yeah. I completely agree. And it's a bit boring, I guess, if we both agree on everything all the time. But in this case, I I think you're totally right. So Yep. Yeah. I'm excited. And, I'm guessing then I would be on all of these calls, if not, you know, most of them so that I can hear direct from these people about what they're looking for as opposed to you just having the call and then explaining it to me. I think that will be really valuable.

Yeah. I it just depends. Right? I think there might be different the goal let's say what the goal would be. The goal I think the goal would be for us to get in a position that if we just had a quick like, you were like, oh, I'm thinking about doing this, you're like, oh, I'm gonna call Zoe.

Yeah. I think so.

Yep. So sometimes I've got no issue. I'll text someone if I think I'm, like, in a good relationship with them just to find out their feedback, just one or two answers.

Yeah. Gotta text someone. But, yeah, just a short, sharp, hey, I'm thinking of this. You know? What do you think about that or whatever? Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

Yep. Cool. So

So back to your your question and plans for next week. We have a few meetings where there will be some interesting decisions Yep. Or we should get some interesting feedback. So some meetings coming up next week, which I'll be in, and I'm excited for both of them, the ones that I'm thinking of. On the dev side, it's a good question.

Yeah. So I think I was thinking the other day as well, we're looking at these screenshots, Maybe just going through a couple of the screens and going just talking through, is that the best layout? Right? Just maybe polishing it up a little bit. Yep. Just having a look at that.

Yeah.

That'll be interesting. Another thing we're doing as a because you and I live in different cities. You're down in Sydney. I'm in Brisbane. Is I think going on we've agreed to go on this journey together, and it could be two years.

I think so too. I I can't wait. And Nicole had the idea of, like, we'll both Instead of just a call that's like a five minute, hey. How's it going? You know? Alright. Bye. She was like, yeah. What if we what if we had dinner, like, sitting at our table, we put the laptop at the other end of the table? You guys do the same. It might be a little harder with kids and and everything. But, yeah, we'll we'll make it work. So it'll be like a one big virtual Yeah. Table. Yeah. So yeah. And we

I'm actually looking forward to that the most. I'm looking forward that to most, to be honest. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, we were we were meant to do it a couple weeks ago, and then but we didn't have it in the calendar. And, yeah, then I'm like I'm telling Nicole, like, hey. You know, we're doing this dinner tonight with Gav and Mel, and and then it gets to I think we'd set it at, like, 07:30 my time or something like that. And I'm like I messaged you on Slack. I'm like, hey. Like, how are going? I don't hear anything. It gets to 07:30. Doesn't happen.

We will It's in the calendar. Yeah. It's in Mel's calendar. So if it's in Mel's calendar, it really happens.

So Excellent.

Yep. Yeah. Next week, we got some interesting meeting, one in particular. The first one didn't go that great, and, so we've been working hard to rectify that. And Yeah. If we can get that okay, like, that opens us up to a really sizable

Yeah.

Opportunity. So we're yeah. And next week, I'll just start doing a little more business development, like, just reaching out to some people. And, yeah, we'll go from we'll go from there.

Yeah. It's exciting, mate. It's exciting times. Every week, I'm, like, I'm looking forward to how we're continuing to push the envelope. And I I need to do my part on the dev side now that this doc is out of the way, the overview doc.

Yep. So one thing one thing I'll do as well is we've been having these sporadic well, I've been having these sporadic conversations with many different people, and they've been not enough for me to record in HubSpot or a CRM, but there's too many now for me to I've forgotten some of the people that I've spoken to, and it's only when my memory's jogged. I'm like, oh, jeez. I needed to send that off. So, next week, what I will do by this time next Thursday well, we're gonna have a podcast on Thursday, but Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well, let's do it. I look forward to that. I don't think like, obviously, we were not we're not gonna share any of those details, but we can talk about how we're doing that because that might be really interesting for, you know Yep. People in similar positions to us as well. How does a sales and marketing extraordinaire, I think you called yourself in the in the pre roll, how does someone like that keep track of everything in in HubSpot?

Yep. Mate, I think you should keep all that intro in the beginning where you're getting angry with me. Mitch is having a script that I won't follow. So Yep. Anyway, alright, mate.

Yeah. You too. Alright. See you. See

you, everyone.